


All Things Pass

by Cuda (Scylla)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anxiety, Apologies, Awkward Conversations, Castiel (Supernatural) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Don't copy to another site, Episode Related, Episode: s14e15 Peace of Mind, Episode: s14e16 Don't Go In the Woods, M/M, Missing Scene, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Winchester Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 06:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18309671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scylla/pseuds/Cuda
Summary: Takes place sometime during "Don't Go Into the Woods." Reality catches up to Castiel, driving him out of the Bunker. While he didn't exactly count on Sam to figure him out... he's grateful for the call. They'll figure things out. Right? Right. They always do.





	All Things Pass

The headlights of Castiel's Lincoln carved a narrow path of clarity through the dark. It was dawn now, more or less; the thin woods near Lebanon long since given way to the misty green carpet of spring wheat.

His hands meditated on the steering wheel, thumbs rubbing the stitching over and over again. He counted the stitches, again and again, and labeled his thoughts.

 _I am thinking I don't know what to do,_ Castiel thought, _I am thinking my hubris has cost us all, again._

The chest of his vessel constricted in reaction to his end-of-the-line thoughts. The ones that drove him through a mire of lame excuses and out onto the road. 'Stretch his legs.' Stretch his legs, yes, in a flat panicked run.

 _I am feeling fear,_ Castiel thought. He felt it in the jaw of his vessel, teeth clenched and neck taut. He felt it in the hard heartbeat and the rapid breaths. Even absent a human consciousness, with so much of its original purpose suppressed, the human body knew what to do with itself. It made inhabiting a vessel somewhat less complicated; or rather removed one complication from a thousand others. He didn't have to think about breathing. He could stop it, but if he didn't stop it, the body would breathe on its own.

It breathed in hard gusts, shivering. As if it grieved without him.

 _I am thinking about a worst case scenario,_ Castiel said to himself.

_I am feeling fear, but it will pass. As all things pass._

Like humans pass. Humans burn brightly, but quick. These fragile mortal beings would leave them alone to go on - hadn't he said as much to Jack? Had he hurried these events by drawing that separating line?

On the seat beside him, Castiel's phone illuminated. He snatched it up after a pause, eyes flicking briefly from the road to the name.

A stop sign glowed red in Castiel's peripheral vision. He braked, and swept his thumb across the screen.

"Sam, I want to apologize," he blurted, "I shouldn't have said anything to—"

"Cas?" Sam cut him off, his voice clear as if he sat in the cab, "It's fine. I've done the same thing plenty of times. Are you okay?"

The car lurched back on its shocks at the intersection. He'd braked too hard. Castiel heaved a sigh - when he did that consciously, it usually made him feel better. "I'm fine."

It only sort of worked, this time. Maybe he should do it again.

He heard the hollow thud of a book landing on a table. "You said 'you needed to stretch your legs,'" Sam said, in a passable mimicry of Castiel's voice, "Dude, really?"

Castiel's free palm tapped a beat on the wheel. _Shave-and-a-haircut, fuck you._ "I may not experience boredom, but even I can feel cooped up, Sam. I'm quite a bit bigger than you, after all."

Sam snorted. "Yeah. Right."

Castiel rolled his eyes. "Has something happened? What do you need?"

"Nothing. I was checking on you. The way you sort of bolted out of here I thought… you know. They were your team, too."

A pickup pulled up behind Castiel at the intersection, with the high whistle of worn brake pads. He realized he'd been at the intersection, alone, for longer than necessary. He couldn't say quite how long; his perception of time hadn't been quite right since he stepped into a human vessel.

He accelerated. "Are you all right?" Castiel asked.

Sam paused, a coiling tension growing in the silence, "Um. No. I'm not. What you said back there. About failing."

Guilt lurched in Castiel's middle. "If I hurt you, I'm sorry," he said, "It wasn't my—"

"No, you were right," Sam interrupted, "I needed to hear it. It made me re-think some things. When we got back, I told Dean why I left. I know why it was so easy for Harrington to get to me. I really hate it in the Bunker right now - I just see their bodies. Everywhere."

"Chip Harrington's manipulation was not a litmus test of your values," Castiel insisted, "What I said was meant to challenge the false identity he'd put in your mind. You're not weak, or a failure."

"Come on, are you surprised?" Sam demanded, "That I slid right down into his perfect, apple-pie life?"

"You're carrying more pain and trauma than any human ever should." Castiel countered, "Wanting to be free of suffering isn't wrong. You've never been wrong for wanting that."

He heard the soft, strained huff of laughter, across the line. In his thoughts, Castiel saw Sam duck his head. Close his eyes with a self-depreciating smile, and let the offer of absolution roll off his back like water. _Not if you're a Winchester,_ he'd say. Castiel could disagree, but the words would be empty. He'd toe that same line himself, in the end.

A family of martyrs, all of them.

Sam shifted subjects. "Anyway, when Dean told me you'd left too, I thought we might have that in common."

His vessel's heart found another gear, rattling the inside of his chest until he vibrated. Castiel couldn't focus. The morning was too busy, too much to manage, as his thoughts filled with bodies and burned, empty eyesockets. He pulled onto the shoulder of the road, put the car in park and slowly, deliberately, turned off the motor.

"You still there?" Sam asked.

"I hadn't really thought about it," Castiel said, and sagged against the door, hand over his eyes. He could still see them. Maggie's charred eyes.

"Oh." Sam's voice went a little flat. "I mean, that's fine."

"Wait!" Castiel cried, realizing he'd reached out in blind panic when his hand crashed into the dash. His knuckles left a depression, a rip in the vinyl and a soft dip where the plastic cracked. "That's not what I meant. I have. We do have that in common. But there have been other priorities since we left Arkansas."

"That's okay too," Sam said in a rush, "you don't have to. But if you do want to talk about it, I'm here."

Castiel pulled his hand back, examining the knuckles. He didn't have a lot of experience with 'talking about it,' but he understood the phrase as shorthand. Talking about it was an invitation to connect. An invitation to be witnessed.

"What I mean is, I haven't had time to think about it," Castiel said, struggling to slow his words. He missed the quick clarity of celestial telepathy at times like this. "I've been reacting, instead of thinking. And trying to avoid it altogether. Which isn't working."

Sam waited.

"I'm not all right," Castiel admitted, feeling his vessel's stomach muscles knot up as if they could shove the confession out faster, "I'm afraid. I do what I can to mitigate it, to function. But I'm never not thinking about death. Yours, Jack's, Dean's. Maggie's. Every day, I expected to come home to bodies."

They sat for a while, linked by the dead air on the connection.

"I told Jack I've made peace with it," Castiel added, "but that's bullshit. I'm terrified of losing you. All of you."

"'Making peace' is bullshit," Sam replied, cynicism carving his voice to a razor edge, "we don't _accept_ anything. We're _Winchesters_."

The declaration shocked them both, and the silence stretched out further.

Castiel wasn't sure who started to giggle first. If he'd wanted to examine it, he might have guessed it came from nerves, from the vulnerability of laying these truths before an audience with the capacity to hurt them. But the laughter went on without his gaze.

"Maybe we should though, sometimes," Sam offered, rougher and thicker than before, "you know? Because I'm afraid this is what's gonna kill us. We keep going and going, and it never stops."

 _All things pass,_ Castiel thought again, but didn't say it. Because, with inevitable entropy, Sam's pain _would_ stop. But while Castiel didn't consider himself skilled at tact, he knew the danger of offering that reassurance.

Pain - for a Winchester, anyway - only seemed to stop one way.

They'd both come far too close to the edge of that.

Instead, Castiel said, "I'm coming home."


End file.
